I have wondered at times what the Ten Commandments would have looked like if Moses had run them through the US Congress.
The greatest leader is not necessarily the one who does the greatest things. He is the one that gets the people to do the greatest things.
I can't help but believe that in the future we will see in the United States and throughout the Western world an increasing trend toward the next logical step, employee ownership. It is a path that befits a free people.
Today it is difficult to find leaders who are independent of the forces that have brought us our problems: The Congress, the bureaucracy, the lobbyists, big business, and big labor.
I've long believed one of the mainsprings of our own liberty has been the widespread ownership of property among our people and the expectation that anyone's child, even from the humblest of families, could grow up to own a business or corporation.
Meanwhile, what about the workers in those state monopolies that are being put up for sale? I am reminded of a technique for employee ownership that has worked well for many U.S. companies. It goes by various names, but the best known is "Employee Stock Ownership Program," or ESOP.
Our economic assistance must be carefully targeted, and must make maximum use of the energy and efforts of the private sector... Economic freedom is the world's mightiest engine for abundance and social justice... Developing countries need to be encouraged to experiment with a growing variety of arrangements for profit sharing and expanded capital ownership.
Our Founding Fathers well understood that concentrated power is the enemy of liberty and the rights of man. They knew that the American experiment in individual liberty, free enterprise and republican self-government could succeed only if power were widely distributed. And since in any society social and political power flow from economic power, they saw that wealth and property would have to be widely distributed among the people of the country. The truth of this insight is immediately apparent.
Could there be anything resembling a free enterprise economy, if wealth and property were concentrated in the hands of a few, while the great majority owned little more than the shirts on their backs?
Could there be anything but widespread misery, where a privileged few controlled a nation's wealth, while millions labored for a pittance, and millions more were desperate for want of employment?
Some years ago a top Ford official was showing the late Walter Reuther through the very automates plant in Cleveland, Ohio and he said to him jokingly, "Walter, you'll have a hard time collecting union dues from these machines." and Walter said, "you are going to have more trouble trying to sell automobiles to them." Both of them let it stop there. There was a logical answer to that ... the owners of the machines could buy automobiles and if you increase the number of owners you increase the number of consumers.
It should be clear to everyone that the nation's steadfast policy should afford every American of working age a realistic opportunity to acquire the ownership and control of some meaningful form of property in a growing national economy.
Over hundred years ago Abraham Lincoln signed the Homestead Act. There was wide distribution of land and they didn't confiscate anyone's privately owned land... We need an industrial Homestead Act.
Could there be a better answer to the stupidity of Karl Marx than millions of workers individually sharing in the ownership of the means of production.
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